For days, Oakland attorneys Walter Riley and Barbara Rhine said they, their Haitian friends and the local people they met on the street were the only rescuers assisting the wounded in their neighborhood and the streets beyond.

"I saw no official aid, no official vehicle, no officials doing help with the rescue. I saw no police. I saw no U.N. people helping," said Riley, who returned home with Rhine, his wife, on Saturday. "All we had was soap and water and alcohol and peroxide and bandages. The first night we had some electricity because we had a generator, but then the generator had no more gas."

The home where they were staying as guests near downtown Port-au-Prince had minimal damage after the magnitude 7.0 earthquake shook the city Tuesday afternoon, but there was destruction all around them — a gas station that exploded and burst into flames, a collapsed hospital nearby, the wrecked presidential palace a few blocks away.

The family had traveled to the country earlier this year in order to help the people of Haiti, visiting local schools, clinics and human rights activists on behalf of the Berkeley-based Haiti Emergency Relief Fund and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. The earthquake, however, changed everything.

The courtyard of their home turned into a makeshift medical clinic as they brought out the limited equipment they had and began applying it to wounds.

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"More and more people started to come, and next thing we had a yard full of people," Riley said. Some people arrived with what Riley now believes were severe internal injuries, but there were no medical professionals to diagnose them. A powerful aftershock made things worse as darkness set in. Riley said they were lucky to have brought a flashlight as they used it to find people trapped in the wreckage.

"Buildings were crumbling, and people were being buried under the rubble of the concrete structures," he said.

Always, they said, it was local people doing the relief work — often struggling through the rubble for their own friends and family. The couple left angered by the failure of international agencies to get medical help to so many afflicted Haitians in time.

"They were not doing anything that made any difference in the locations where I saw them," Riley said. "What was needed was rescue and medical supplies the first few days. It would have made a difference to a lot of people."

Running out of drinking water and supplies, and with Rhine needing medication for an injury, the couple and Rhine's daughter made it to the U.S. Embassy on Thursday evening and were evacuated. The daughter, who is 30, has returned to her New York home. A few hours after Riley and Rhine returned to Oakland, they were tired but already expressed a yearning to go back and help.

"Having gone through these few days, and witnessed this horror, (Haiti) feels like a part of me," Riley said.

A number of other Northern California residents once believed missing in Haiti have been accounted for, and some are staying in the country to help residents.

"We have been asked to help with the relief efforts and feel that it is our moral obligation to help while we are in Haiti," wrote UC Berkeley doctoral student Jessica Vechakul in an e-mail.

The mechanical engineering student was working on a project called Fuel from the Fields in the port city of Les Cayes — about 140 miles southwest of the capital city of Port-au-Prince — when the earthquake shook the region.

She was there with Ryan Stanley, an MBA candidate at the Haas School of Business, who was also reported to be safe.

Also safe was another Haas student, Glodine Jourdan, who is originally from Haiti and was working in Cap Haitien with a Farmer to Farmer program sponsored by USAID. UC Davis earlier in the week tracked down its only missing student, Starry Sprenkle, who was in Haiti working on a doctoral degree in ecology.

UC Berkeley officials told students and faculty Saturday that the school would extend its travel insurance coverage to any current student or staff member going to Haiti for the relief effort, even if they go with a group that is not affiliated with the university, such as the Red Cross.

"The University of California's public service mission has no boundaries," wrote Nathan Bostrom, a vice chancellor of administration. "Last Tuesday's tragedy in Haiti will no doubt motivate many campus faculty, staff and students to participate in relief efforts there."

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To view video of Oakland attorneys Walter Riley and Barbara Rhine talk about their experience in Haiti, go to abclocal.go.com/kgo and click on "East Bay."